Tesoro Refinery Fire

I guess this happened about 12:30 AM this morning.  I called my mom around 8 who said it shook the entire house – they weren’t sure what it was at first but then the refinery sirens started going off.

As somebody who’s grown up in Anacortes, let me tell you that there are few things scarier then the alarm on top of the steam house building – especially when you know it’s not just a test.  They test the alarm every Wednesday at noon – it’s a great big air raid siren almost identical to the ones used in the Midwest for tornado sirens.  It’s a sound that goes straight into your bones and freezes you from the inside out.

My dad used to work out there at the Shell refinery (there are three different companies out there, but they’re so close it might as well be one compound) and every time something would happen we would be worried until we heard from him.  He was fired not too long ago because it was cheaper to hire new people then it was to pay for all the benefits of somebody who’d been there longer.  At first we were all pretty upset about it, but I can’t tell you how relieving it is to know that he’s out of harms way every time there’s something wrong.

The last time I remember a massive explosion at the refinery I was in 6th grade…I think six people died?  My elementary school was put into lockdown on the off chance that any toxic gasses or ash floated across the bay.  I know the families all got massive cash settlements from the company (one of them moved in across the street from us, but that’s another story entirely) and it really shook the town up.

I’ve been in an odd state of mind all morning – I’m frustrated to death being stuck at work behind this desk depending on others for information, and I know that part of it is because I’m in full-on news mode and part of it is because I feel like I should be in Anacortes.  It’s my home, my community and I feel like I should be there to mourn with them.

It’s such a small town that even if I don’t know anyone who was killed directly, I’ll likely know someone who did – and in that way everyone is brought together as a community.

My thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims – three were killed in the original blast, and one of the four flown down to Harborview’s Burn Unit succumbed to her injuries not even an hour ago.  It’s not looking good for the other three.

Tesoro is having a news conference at 2 o’clock, and all I can do for now is wait.

Shaking In My Sleep

I moved down to Tacoma on December 6th or so, and about twice a week since then I’ve had incredibly vivid dreams that more often then not contain a fairly violent earthquake.

This is odd on several levels.  First, I rarely if ever remember my dreams.  When I do, it’s vague snippits that don’t make much sense and tend to fade over the day.  With these, I can recall long stretches down to the smallest detail – the sights, sounds, emotions, locations, characters – all of it.

Second, the earthquakes are the only similar characteristic linking them all together.  Sometimes they involve people I know, sometimes I’m by myself.  Oftentimes there’s some sort of destruction involved, but it’s not uncommon for everything the the dream to shake violently for a second or two and then go back to normal with whatever the storyline of the evening was.

I wish I had an explanation for myself.  I’d blame it on the media’s hypersensitivity to earthquakes right now, but they began in December – long before the earthquake in Haiti, or even the little mentioned 6.1 in Northern California before Christmas.

I went through and 8.7 when I was living on Guam, so my brain even has authentic source material to re-create these things from and I always wake up disoriented and confused.

Dear brain: knock it off!

Vacation!

Alright, so this is a ways down the road yet but I always get excited when I get to plan trips.

One of my favorite authors Neil Gaiman wrote a book nine or so years ago called American Gods.  Part of it featured this neat museum called House on the Rock and it’s incredible carousel.  This year, House on the Rock is contemplating an American Gods themed gathering right around Halloween with some pretty cool stuff.

Since it’s out in Wisconsin I get to visit family AND it’s a chance to meet a bunch of folk that I’ve never spoken too outside of the internet!  I thought it would make for a great trip, and I’m already way ahead of myself in looking up airfare and planning routes.

Here’s the likely route:
View Larger Map

Joe and I would likely fly into the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport, but whether we’re going to HoTR or Merrill first is still up in the air.  I’ve got family in two of three places if lodging emergencies come up, but hopefully we’ll have friends to stay with in Minneapolis and will only need a hotel for HoTR.

Renting a car is the likely mode of transportation – it looks a lot further on the map, but if we were to do the ENTIRE THING in one day, the drive would only be a smidge over twelve hours.  It’s three-ish hours from Minneapolis to Merrill, and five hours even from Merrill to HoTR and HoTR back to Minneapolis.  If we go in that order, we could even probably bring people back with us who needed a ride.

Anyway, absolutely nothing is set yet but I’m fairly confident that this is going down.

All You Need is Love

So this entry is a little personal, more about whats been on my mind lately and less about what’s going on outside of it.

Anyone that follows me on Twitter or knows me in real life knows that I’ve had a terrible cold for the last two or three days.  Hopefully I’ve reached the end part of it, but who knows.  It’s one of those knock down colds where you give up trying to present yourself as anything but pathetic because its impossible.  I’m not a particularly elegant nose-blower, and yesterday at work I didn’t even mind that I sounded like a herd of elephants in our quiet upstairs newsroom because my head was too full of goo to have any room left for caring.

And despite all this and the fact that I drool like crazy when I’m asleep because I can’t breathe through my nose, Joe has stuck around and cared for me.  He made me grilled cheese and soup in bed yesterday so I wouldn’t have to get up.  He bought me cough drops and dayquil and put up with my disgusting germy self to cuddle with me.

On Monday when I nearly put my foot through a solid bathroom door he drove to the store for athletic tape for my poor (fortunately unbroken) toe and came back with a pint of my favorite ice cream.

He is one of the only people to really truly make me feel good about myself and my body and when he tells me I’m beautiful I believe him.

We’ve got a somewhat messy back story to the point that we used to joke about how it wouldn’t be us if it wasn’t twisted up somehow.  Fortunately that’s no longer the case and we’re now just a few days short of five months together.

I’m certain that this is It and yet I still find myself in a state of unbelieving from time to time.  I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve someone as attentive and thoughtful and supportive and willing to go out of their way (and a million other things that I won’t list as I’d probably cap out the work count) as he is but it must have been big.  He doesn’t care that I want to save the world or that I have no balance and I’m constantly tripping over things or that I nearly almost always get us killed when I drive, and I love that our pillow talk often wanders onto topics like the mechanics of light-sabers.  He brings out the best in me just by being himself and that’s more then I would dare even hope for from anyone.

Love you Joeface.

Life on the Fifth Floor

So I made the move to Northwest Cable News this morning.  In fact, as I type this I am sitting at my own little desk in the writers pod.  I know it’s silly, but I always wanted a job in a cubicle and now I have one!

The change thats bothering me most isn’t the lack of people (there was always a pretty small crew on the weekends at KING) but how quiet it is.  Dick even went so far as to call it a tomb today.  I’m used to sitting on the desk with three ringing phones and a bank of twelve or so scanners going non-stop.  Not to mention the conversation and the yelling between people on the floor.  Here my phone never rings, there’s no scanners to speak of and it seems like anyone is afraid to speak above a whisper.

Other then that, this is going to be a great job.  I’m really surprised at the amount of responsibility that comes with the job – not only do I write the stories, but I get to build the graphics that go with them.  The pictures that go up over the shoulder of the anchor, the box with all the bullets in it and so on and so forth: all me.  Eventually I guess I’ll also be typing up the ticker blurbs that scroll along the bottom of the screen.  I have no doubt that my spelling will be flawless within the month.

Today I’m not doing much more then sitting back and observing.  I was given a couple practice stories to write up which I knocked out pretty quickly, and now I’m blogging.  I’ve asked just about everyone if there’s something I should be doing but they’ve all said no.  I *will* be prompting for the 1:45 15/45 segment and the 2:00 show though, so it won’t be a total loss of a day.

They were also really understanding about a weekend coming up where Joe and I had reservations made before we knew that my schedule would be so drastically changed, and instead of swapping me with the afternoon shift like I expected they gave me the whole day.  I’m not too terribly worried about the hours – if my experience up here is anything like my one downstairs, there will be no shortage of extra shifts to fill in.

In the meantime you can probably see my desk when NWCN goes on air.  The studio is immediately in front of the desks and has a clear glass background – the anchor and the main camera are lined up almost exactly with my head.  In case you have nothing better to do and want to play “spot the writer.”

New Job!

I had this big plan to write a blog yesterday about my shitty day. Then I decided I was feeling too bad and didn’t want to do anything but curl up on the couch with a fuzzy blanket and pass out for the rest of the afternoon.  Fortunately everything worked out and today is far better.

Tomorrow I start working for Northwest Cable News as a writer!  I applied for this job originally back in November and hoped desperately that the gentleman doing the interviews would remember me from school and be as impressed with me as he was then.  Fortunately he did and was – unfortunately I was choice number two and number one got the job.

They were kind enough, however, to pass my information along downstairs to KING 5 when they were looking for a teleprompter operator and I was called up unexpectedly for an interview that turned out to be more or less a “if you want it it’s yours” kind of thing.

I’d been there for maybe five or six weeks when NWCN called me back and said the guy they’d hired originally had turned in his two weeks to go and write for the Olympics and that the job was mine if I was still interested.  It wasn’t a difficult decision, but I’d fallen in love with working on the desk for KING and listening to all the scanners and yelling across the newsroom at each other.  NWCN is a much more compact and streamlined deal, not to mention quiet.  I officially accepted and have been sitting around since waiting for a start date.

I got a call this morning informing me that TODAY was their planned start date for me, and I had to explain that I’d been sitting around stressing about finances and waiting on pins and needles for this job to start.  Turns out the guy in charge of telling me when I was starting had forgotten and all was well.  But as a result, I get to start writing tomorrow!

The schedule is going to be a giant pain in the ass, and it’s not even 30 hours, but it pays well and will eventually be a full time job.  I’ll have to learn to sleep in four hour shifts or else I’ll never see anyone ever again.  As much as I love working in media, sometimes I wish that news only happened between 9 and 5.

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Tonight the plan is for Joe to take me to my first ever CLAW (Cartoonist’s League of Absurd Washingtonians) Open Swim where I will sit there and hang out with people and likely be embarassed at my complete lack of skill.  It’s at the Mandolin Cafe, though, so if all else fails I can just drink coffe non-stop and look like I’m doing something.

There’s also leftover Chili for dinner that I made last night and was pretty proud of.  The cornbread turned out to be shit but thats what you get for buying a $1.25 mix.  Someday I will learn to make it from scratch!

In the mean time, there’s no new news on the apartment front – we’re just waiting for my lease to be up and the apartment to be done being refinished. But I guess I can post pictures from the web listing!  It’s beautiful and I can’t wait to move in and make it my own. Ours? Something like that.

Double living room and original hardwood flooring.

Large kitchen complete with pantry and dishwasher.

Breakfast Shenanigans

Breakfast is, without a doubt, my favorite meal of the day.  At any time of the day.  So much, in fact, that there has been speculation of a breakfast wedding banquet at some point.  I wonder if that’s a popular thing?

Anyway – we made breakfast this morning for the first time in several weeks and the scrambled eggs were delicious.  I fail completely and utterly at most egg-based breakfast foods.  They’re usually edible, but I’d never dream of feeding them to anyone but myself. Waffles, pancakes, muffins, breads, pastries, various meats and any other breakfast related foods I take pride in.  Eggs are the one thing that escape my grasp…tricky bastards.

ANYWAY.  I wanted to try and come up with an actual recipe for the eggs to be written down somewhere and this is the closest I’ve come up with.  Obviously they’re never made the same way twice, but I’m more comfortable with altering a solid recipe then I am with pulling entire meals out of the air.  Here goes:

• 5 eggs
• 1 tblsp favorite hot sauce (more if you like spicy food)
• 1/4 cup brown sugar firmly packed
• 2 oz cream cheese cubed

Mix eggs, hot sauce and sugar in a medium sized bowl.  Cook over medium heat until eggs start to solidify. Fold in cream cheese and cook until eggs are done.

Voila!  We did pancakes and maple bacon with the eggs and got the day started off right.  Who cares it if wasn’t started until noon?

Blog entry the first.

Alright!  I have a blog.

I’ve been tossing around the idea of starting another one.  I had a blog almost all the way through high school and the first year or two of college on LiveJournal, but it went by the wayside a while ago and I never picked it back up.  Poking through it the other day I decided that it would be easier to start from scratch then it would to continue where I had left off.

LiveJournal was a source for a lot of drama and I get the feeling that going back there would be akin to hanging around your childhood stomping grounds long after you’ve grown up.  Nobody knows who you are and it’s a little creepy.

I was thinking in the car today on my way to work about how much life has changed, and how where I am now is, simultaneously, the exactly and nothing like I pictured it.  I was on vacation down in Portland last weekend with my boyfriend Joe and we decided on a particularly rainy night to go see Up in the Air.  There was a scene where the younger of the female leads explains that she’d always thought she’d be married and have life straightened out by age 23.  I had to laugh at how ridiculous it sounded until I realized that I’d thought the exact same thing.

I’m not sure if I just picked the number at random or if it was because I dated a 23 year-old in high school who, in my opinion, had his life together. (He didn’t, in case you were wondering.)  Either way, I turned 23 just under two weeks ago and realized that while I may not have my life together, I’m doing a pretty good job of it.

I work for a company that I thought it would take years to get into, I’m moving in with Joe next month and with the exception of student loans I’m completely debt free.  Not to take student loans lightly, but by the time they come around next June you can be damn sure I’ll be ready for them.

My life is far from cemented into place, but at 23 I don’t think I could stand it if it was.  For now things are pretty good and I’m perfectly content to let things continue down this path.